Supersize churches booming

Published 4:00 am, Saturday, July 31, 2004

There's nowhere to park at Walnut Creek's NorthCreek Church on Ygnacio Valley Road. Actually, that's not quite true. There are plenty of parking places on the 7-acre compound. But they're all full.

NorthCreek is growing, steadily and faithfully. When Pastor Jon McNeff arrived 10 years ago, worshipers gathered in the 250-seat chapel. When the two Sunday services filled, they added a third on Saturdays. And when, as McNeff says "they were all jammed," services moved to the 500-seat gymnasium. Now, with some 300 kids in Sunday school, McNeff calculates the three services draw "1,200-1,300" each weekend.

As big as it is, NorthCreek could be getting a lot bigger. Last week, the church filed an application with the city for a $10 million expansion. According to the church Web site, it will include: "a 1,400-seat sanctuary ... a bookstore, coffee bar, welcome and information center, a child care room and choir room." In all, it would total 96,000 square feet.

Welcome to the new world of religion in America. While church membership is down among traditional Protestant denominations, evangelical churches are booming. They're informal, they're playing toe-tapping music, and most of all, they're big. Religion sociologists like Scott Thumma of the Hartford Institute for Religious Research call them mega-churches, a term used to describe churches with congregations of more than 2,000.

There is no doubting the trend.

"In late '90s, there were about 350 mega-churches. Now there are probably 850," Thumma says.

Thumma says it makes perfect sense. Everything else has been super-sized, so why not religion?

"Today, you are born in a big hospital, you go to a multiplex theater, shop at a mall, and work for IBM," he says. "And then you are going to go to a 25-person church? It's incongruous."

NorthCreek doesn't meet the strict mega-church definition. But it is clearly headed for mega-churchdom, and it includes almost all of what Thumma calls "the models for mega-churches."

Among them is a vague sense of denominational identification. NorthCreek is an Evangelical Free Church, but McNeff says, "We don't push denomination." Most mega-churches don't. Thumma quotes one mega-churchgoer as saying, "I went here a year before I found out we were Lutheran."

Nor is there anything threatening about the church. You are much less likely to get fire and brimstone than coffee and a bagel. Many mega-churches have coffee shops and bookstores (McNeff says theirs will be "a Barnes and Noble kind of place"). The gigantic Brentwood Baptist Church in Houston includes a McDonald's.

That's too much for McNeff. But NorthCreek has a K-8 Christian school (tuition: $5,210), a home-repair team and an auto-repair team (motto: "Get greasy for God!"). They also have a "job network" that McNeff says has found work for as many as 10 unemployed parishioners.

Mega-churches are typically found in the suburbs, attract college- educated couples with children and rarely have money problems. NorthCreek's annual budget for this year, published in the worship service bulletin, is $2, 524,350, and the building fund has reached $1,941,966.

Nor is there a lot of gloomy silence or deep religious dogma. Last Sunday's early service began with electric guitars, a full drum set, keyboards, three backup singers and a lead vocalist. When one speaker asked how everyone enjoyed youth camp, the response was a hearty, "Woooo-hoooooo!"

"They want people to enjoy themselves and have a sense of powerfulness and joyfulness," says Nancy Ammerman of Boston University's School of Theology. "There may also be what has been called "the Gospel of Wealth," meaning that God wants you to be happy, healthy and wealthy."

All of which is just fine. No complaints about church-going, coffee- sipping, job-networking facilities. However, there is often friction with the neighborhoods. Cornerstone Christian Center in Antioch is embroiled in a neighborhood dispute about a 20,000-square-foot building it wants to erect. One of McNeff's former churches, Rolling Hills Covenant Church in Rolling Hills Estates (Los Angeles County), is fighting with neighbors opposed to a major expansion.

In 2000, Congress passed the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. Churches are already exempt from paying property taxes, but as a recent USA Today story noted, the law gave churches "the freedom to ignore local land use restrictions unless there is 'a compelling governmental interest' to stop them."

Apparently there rarely has been such an interest. In most cases, government officials decide in favor of the mega-churches. There are two good reasons. First the membership is a large voting bloc. The second was explained by a Rolling Hills city official recently.

The church, she said, "has an operating budget larger than the city."

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